TL;DR:

• We bought a house, sold a house, had a car fire melt the front of a house
• Good customer service can create evangelists for life
• Bad customer service can make a whole county turn against you

Chapter 1: Fire Me Up

“Matt, I think the car’s on fire.”

Thus started one of the craziest journeys into good and bad customer service I’m ever likely to experienced.

What was my wife even talking about? Obviously our car wasn’t on fire. Meanwhile, I’d been moments away from getting the fussy two-year-old in my lap to finally fall asleep.

Turns out, our car was on fire. Right in the driveway, a foot from the house.

We rushed the no-longer-close-to-napping two-year-old to the backyard. A swirling rod of black smoke rose from the house like a giant unicorn horn piercing the sky. Sirens grew louder as we stood helpless, unable to see what was happening on the other side of the fence.

A firefighter would later say his hose doused the fire just as it was making its leap from car to house. The whole front was melted into a Salvador Dali painting and the driveway looked like a car-shaped meteor had crashed into it, but he saved the house.

Amidst the ensuing chaos of firefighters and neighbors, a car approached, slowed, stared aghast, then sped away. It was the people who had just purchased the house days earlier.

Let me back up.

Chapter 2: Real Estate Moguls?

A few weeks earlier, my mother-in-law suggested we look at a house that just came on the market, (in)conveniently located very close to where she lived. The thing was foreclosed on and, in her opinion, extremely under value.

She was right. We could absolutely see the potential through the punched and kicked in walls, the urine-stained carpets and nicotine-stained ceilings, the nail-gunned molding and moldy basement. Oh, there was also a bedroom that had once displayed a life-sized sticker of one of the previous owner’s tween kids, but the sticker had been partially removed and all that remained was his disembodied head floating on the wall. That image still haunts me.

We were not expecting to buy a house. We didn’t even have a realtor, so we asked the person showing the house on behalf of the bank that now owned it if we could submit an offer through him. The asking price was an off number, so I had the bright idea of offering $2,000 more to make it end in a zero.

The next day, the bank’s realtor called to inform us several offers came in and ask if we want to increase ours. We did not. We were already at our limit and hadn’t actually been looking to buy anyway. If it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen.

A few weeks went by. That was that, right?

Nope! While waiting at a doctor’s office, my wife received this message: “Congratulations the bank has accepted your offer!”

Huh? How?

Also, we still had our current house, not at all ready to be sold! And no realtor to help sell it! This wasn’t supposed to happen!

It seemed that two better offers had fallen through, and because of our extra $2,000, we were next in line.

Crap.

Hustle time. Items rushed into a storage unit, realtors vetted, walls painted. We did the draining dance of diligent cleaning and turning on all lights before every random evening showing. And boom — sold!

Then the car caught fire and melted the front of the house. And the buyers drove past to assess the damage.

Double crap.

Here comes my first run-in with great customer service.

Chapter 3: Greatest Humans Ever

The insurance agent may have been, without a trace of hyperbole, the single greatest human to have ever existed. After listening intently to the situation, he moved through the various approval processes with extreme precession. Next came other contenders for Greatest Human Ever: siding guys and driveway guys and a team of electricians, all equally quick and precise. They didn’t inflate their costs to leverage the situation. They altered their schedules. Presidential Medal of Freedom deservers, all of them. The homeowners now had beautiful new siding, lights, and driveway. What a wonderful housewarming gift!

Business moral time!

As a result of these efforts, I sung the companies’ praises to anyone who would listen, and even those who wouldn’t. I will hire them for all relevant projects until the end of time. What’s the business lesson here? Solve a problem for a prospect — better yet, go out of your way for them — and you’ll earn a customer (and maybe even an evangelist) for life.

Conversely, go out of your way to be awful, and you’ll create an enemy.

Chapter 4: The Worst Day

With the sale of the house resolved, we still had a charred car to deal with, plus my car that’d been turned into Two-Face thanks to its parking spot next to the fire. And now comes the bad customer service.

The car had caught fire minutes after being serviced. My wife had picked it up, driven it the three miles home, went in the house, then decided to re-install the car seat and came back out to discover the engine smoking. The insurance adjuster’s theory is that a mechanic left a rag on the engine, which eventually caught fire. Because the evidence literally went up in smoke, there was no way to prove it.

But long before the dealership knew they couldn’t be proven legally liable, they taught a masterclass in horrific customer service.

While I talked to our car insurance company and sidestepped firefighters, my wife called the dealership to explain that mere minutes after leaving their lot, the car they’d serviced was ash.

“Ugh,” the service manager said, “this has just been the worst day. Before you, some lady lost her engagement ring between the seats.”

Um, okay. We’re…sorry for you? Now about our smoldering vehicle…

“We don’t do loner cars,” the service manager said. Apparently my wife responded with, “You’re the largest dealership on the east coast, you don’t have cars available?”

“It’s policy. We don’t do loner cars.”

At this point, apparently my father-in-law snatched the phone to rage at this person. A few minutes later, a loner car was ready to be picked up.

Next came getting reimbursed $800 for the service. They fought us on that across multiple days. I’ll just pause to acknowledge we were young, trying to make our way in the world, about to take on a new house investment we never expected, and dealing with massive home repairs, and that $800 was very, very much needed. Plus, you know, the principle.

Finally, I resorted to Googling the name of the owner of the suite of dealerships and leaving a disgruntled voicemail. Seconds later, his secretary called. With the owner involved, progress occurred — they agreed to reimburse us the cost of the service. As long as we signed a release that we wouldn’t sue for any additional damages.

Hey, look, I understand their side. We signed it. But ooph, every person we interacted with during this process was awful, as if they all attended the same training on how to develop disgruntled customers. Perhaps best of all, though, is that 11 years later, we still get calls and mailers that it’s time to service the car they set on fire. In fact, as I was writing this, a mailer arrived about a recall.

Marketers, please maintain your customer lists better than this.

Business moral time!

As much as I evangelized for the heroes of this story, word got around about the villains. I didn’t even have to denounce them. All I’d do is share my side of the events at a dinner party, and guests would volunteer on their own never to visit that dealership again. Not because of the car fire, but because of how they handled the car fire.

We were loyal customers, and they made it extremely clear with their actions and attitudes that they did not care one bit about us, or the woman who lost her engagement ring. We were just another set of problems to them. Another reason to express “ugh.” That’s the exact opposite impression you’re supposed to give to customers.

Of course, this is not the end of the story. We still have to talk about how, after selling our house and miraculously getting it repaired before closing, we almost didn’t get the other house.

Chapter 5: A Happy Ending

The newly acquired interest rate for the new home was soon expiring, and during the fire drama (for the record: getting home insurance approval, repairing the house, getting car insurance approval, replacing the car, plus fixing my car), interest rates had more than doubled, essentially pricing us out of the market and ensuring that if the deal didn’t go through, we’d be homeless.

What was the problem?

Mold in the basement and a wooden board over a broken window relegated the house as “uninhabitable.” The mortgage company wouldn’t provide a loan to a house that was uninhabitable.

But a bank technically owned the property, and unlike a normal human seller who could make updates before a sale, it refused to make repairs. The bank also wouldn’t allow us to do the work on their behalf. It was irrelevant that we intended to immediately gut the basement and bring in mold remediation specialists.

With days before the pre-approval expired, it looked like the deal would collapse, the house off limits to anyone who couldn’t pay in cash. Now we’d be out of our old house, have no new house, and facing skyrocketed interest rates for any theoretical future dwelling.

Enter our final hero, the original bank realtor. Talk about great customer service! This guy worked all his contacts, relentlessly prodding and negotiating on our behalf, until he finally wielded some sort of wizardly magic to strike a last-minute deal where, if we agreed in writing that we would have the repairs complete within 30 days of the purchase, with an appraiser coming to confirm completion, we wouldn’t be made homeless. Unlike with the car dealership, I’ve never been happier to write my name on a piece of paper.

A happy ending if ever I saw one, until I entered my new house and walked up the stairs and forgot to brace myself for the floating head. Jump scare alert! That room was one of the first we painted.

Okay, so now, the moral. Was this saga the most stressful time of my life? No question. And that includes when I was almost stabbed with a butcher knife by an escaped mental patient (let’s save that for a future topic). But this stressful period of time was made both better and worse by customer service.

Chapter 6: The Lesson

The service you provide to customers and prospects really matters. It matters to your business, and it matters to their lives.

I sent so many referrals to those companies that went out of their way to help us. I went looking for people who needed new siding or driveways. I may have even intentionally damaged some properties just to get them work (kidding, I didn’t really do that).

But the dealership that went out of their way to actively not care that a car they sold and serviced almost murdered a young couple and their adorable two-year-old daughter? Pretty much all of Bucks County Pennsylvania knew the story of what happened and how they responded.

Go out of your way for your customers. If it costs you a few more minutes or even a few more dollars, it’s worth it. The president of Arc Intermedia, Dave Sonn, has taught all of us this philosophy. Costing you a little more now will pay itself back and then some with a long-term customer, good referrals, and just plain goodwill. If it’s the right thing to do — do it.

Don’t tell a hysterical working mother at the end of a weekend whose source of transportation is melted into her newly sold driveway that even though you have access to literally thousands of cars, you don’t “do” loaners.

Again, I do get their perspective. At that point, they didn’t know what caused the fire, so in their mind, they shouldn’t have to throw money away by giving us anything. But we bought a car from them, and always got it serviced by them, and six minutes after the most recent service it was on fire. They should’ve just done the right thing and given the hysterical working mother a loaner until insurance reimbursed them anyway. Which is ultimately what they did, begrudgingly, with sullen and obnoxious attitudes.

Be the insurance guy instead. Be the realtor.

Be a hero.